Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

As a community, Muslims in India have always been
burdened to prove their loyalty to the country. They are repeatedly asked to
take tests of nationalism and patriotism in order to prove their love for the
country. Whether it is cricket match against Pakistan or the matter of singing
the national song, accusatory fingers have always been cast on Muslims,
reminding them that as a community, they will always have to go through this
test of loyalty.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

However, the reason that Hassan Radwan
gives for historicizing the Quran is simplistic and problematic. Firstly, it is
not true that one cannot beat the traditionalists in the game of selective
quotation from Quranic passages supporting moderate and liberal voices.
Scholars, both modern (like Amina Wadud) and traditional (like Fazlur Rahman)
have shown how a different hermeneutical reading of the Quran is possible: one
that is consistent with a modern and liberal worldview. It is true that in most
of the Muslim countries, such interpretations have either remained marginal or
have altogether failed....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

While the section of the media which supported major
Gogoi was doing so for obvious ideological reasons having thrown to the wind
the cautious journalistic ideal of speaking truth to power, those who were
mildly critical of major Gogoi’s action were the more interesting of the two.
This later section of the media portrayed the entire incident as an exception
rather than a rule and that in doing so this major had erred and deviated from
the norm followed by the Indian army. ...

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Laws of blasphemy only bring disrepute to the Muslim world. Given that
it has no sanction in the holy Quran, Muslims themselves should protest against
such a discriminatory law within their midst. After all, of they believe that
they should get a free right of expression, then it is only logical that
followers of other religious traditions and those having a different
interpretation of Islam should also be given the same rights. ...

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

The expectations of the MRM is laden with assumptions which in themselves might be completely untrue. In telling the Indian Muslims to become nationalist, they are assuming that Indian Muslims are not nationalist which is blatantly untrue. Any scholar of Indian Islam will tell us that it was Deoband which fought valiantly during the freedom struggle. It is however true, that there are deeper differences over the meaning of nationalism itself. But those differences are not just between Hindu and Muslim groups but also between Hindus themselves. If the suggestion of the MRM is that Indian Muslims do not love their country then it is blatantly false. Similarly the assertion that Indian Muslim share the same ancestors as that of the Hindu community might be true to a large extent. But to suggest that therefore Indian Muslims should willingly subjugate aspects of their religious and cultural identity to the cultural demands of the Hindus is going too far.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

The teenagers involved in Dhaka attacks had named Zakir Naik as their
inspiration. Now it can be very well argued that for every militant there are
millions others who do not derive the same message from preachers like Zakir
Naik or Omar Bakri. But this argument misses the small point that one doesn’t
need an army to launch a terror attack. One or two convinced individual is
enough to create mayhem. There is therefore a greater need to put on surveillance
these imams who preach hate in the name of Islam or any other religion....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Now again, what authorities do the Qazis have in contemporary India?
How are they to ensure that the marriage contract expressly forbids instant
triple Talaq? Given the situation that Muslim women are at the receiving end,
what if there is pressure on them not to put this component in the contract.
How is the Qazi then supposed to behave and act? The simple fact is that Qazis
have no authority today and by invoking the institution of the Qazis, the
AIMPLB is telling us that they still live in a time when the institution of
Qazi was relevant. And that precisely seems to be the problem. They are living
in a time warp and refuse to wake from their slumber and see the light of the
day. The world has changed while they slept all this while.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

In the run up to the presidency, Donald Trump, embraced a rhetoric
about Muslims which put even his far right friends in Europe to shame. Calling
Muslims as enemies, he told the Americans that ‘they hate us’ that ‘they’ want
to overrun America and all this because there was some fundamental flaw in
their religion. For some time, it looked as if Islam and Muslims became the
other of America. This polarizing campaign helped him garner votes from even
non republicans who were fed on a daily diet of Islamic takeover of Christian
America. The man who advocated a
complete ban on Muslims entering America, today has done a complete u-turn and
is now telling Muslims to dispel extremist teachings from within their
societies. His speech in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is ridden with confusion
and only tells us about his ignorance of the problem that the world is
confronting today in the name of Islamic terrorism.…

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

There is no dearth of educated Muslims who have researched and worked
extensively on women issues within the community. They are progressives and a
majority of them want the practice of triple Talaq to be removed. Yet, we do
not see them representing the community on the television screens. Instead what
we have are stale mullahs known for their antediluvian views which will put any
community to shame. I do not believe that they are called because producers cannot
find moderate progressive voices within the community. I believe that it is a
well thought out strategy paint the Muslim community as backward by
representing them through the mullahs....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

And why just blame the ruling dispensation when cow protection has been high on the agenda of so called secular parties like the Congress.The problem is that we have never confronted the problem with all the might that is required. As I look at the responses to the murder of Pehlu Khan, I fear with trepidation at the silence of the secular parties on the issue. No candle light vigils, not even a silent symbolic protest against such a brutal lynching. I wonder whether the secular response has also reached a new normal....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

And yet the Prophet himself gave us a very different message. One of the stories about him is that he was daily abused by a woman when he used to preach the message of Islam. The Prophet never rebuked her but actually went to her house and inquired about her health when she fell ill. That message seems to have been lost on his followers. They want to do what the Prophet never taught. Perhaps this generation of Muslims understand Islam much better than the Prophet himself. Allah definitely warns all those who insult the Prophet, but then he goes on to say that He is the only one to judge them. But today, Muslims have themselves become the judge, the jury and the executioner in cases related to blasphemy...

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

It is true that personal law of Muslims is protected by the constitution. But it is also true that the same constitution talks about fundamental rights and rights of equal opportunity for women. Personal laws cannot become the reason for backwardness of Muslim women just because a handful of Muslim men think that Sharia is divine which in fact it is not. Moreover, the law has to change over time and especially change when women groups have documented cases of discrimination due to the continuance of such a law. A community which does not change with the times is only condemned to be consigned to the flames of history....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

It is not also
enough to say that when Prophet of Islam went to Medina, women sang in his
honour. It is also not enough to cite Hadiths where it is stated through Aisha,
the Prophet’s wife that women used to come and sing in her house in the
presence of the Prophet. What is required is an attempt to break this scholarly
consensus which argues that music and singing is forbidden in Islam. Doing so
does not require an exegetical exercise of sifting through the pages of Islamic
literature, but to argue boldly and consistently that Islam needs to be one
with the fundamental marker of contemporary modernity: that of expanding choice
and freedom. It is up to these Mullahs and overtly sensitive Muslims to decide
whether they want Islam to become an ossified, irrelevant doctrine or whether
they want it to be a flag bearer of inclusivity and freedom....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

While reams of
paper have been wasted arguing the positives and negatives of demonetization,
what escaped the analysts’ attention was that this was never a move about black
money or to positively influence the economic order. It was a thorough
political move aimed at transforming Modi into an icon of the poor. While we
all saw the recalibration of ATMs to accommodate new notes, what we missed was
the simultaneous recalibration of Modi’s image as the messiah of the poor.
Politics is about perceptions and till the time Modi is seen as hurting the
interests of the rich, he will remain the darling of the masses....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

The media
overreach which happened in this case actually helps no one. Going ballistic
over the ‘ISIS in India’ and coming to conclusions even before the
investigating agencies have started looking into the profile of alleged
terrorists only helps stoke negative fears about a section of Indian
population. More so when the same media houses have maintained a studied
silence on the alleged links of some members of Madhya Pradesh unit of BJP with
the ISI or the recent conviction of some members of the RSS in Ajmer blast
case. This hypocrisy only lends credence to the perception that the media is
biased and has an agenda which makes the Muslim community nervous.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Syed Shahabuddin

A career
bureaucrat, a politician and a chronicler of Muslim times are some of the ways
in which one can describe Syed Shahabuddin. A risk taker, he resigned from his
job in the Indian Foreign Service to become a full time politician, something
which was a rarity those days, especially for someone who was a Muslim. A man
with middle class moorings, it must have required great courage and conviction
to leave his job and try to dabble in politics....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

In absolute
terms, the attack on Tarek Fatah must be condemned. There cannot be any context
to what was pure and simple an act of heckling, intimidation and violence. There is simply no excuse for this kind of
behaviour. Certainly there are more civil ways to air one’s differences, but
then who cares to keep a tab on their own instincts of hatred. I am appalled to
hear excuses like Tarek Fatah shouldn’t have been there in the first place,
that his mere presence ignited the mob because of his Islamophobic utterances.
This is all nonsense...

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Isn’t it known for a fact that Salafi madrasas equate visitations to
shrines as grave worship and therefore consider majority of South Asian Muslims
as potential idolaters? The same hate is being peddled in the name of Islamic
literature through cheap publications and sermons on televisions. Acts like
bombing shrines are a direct result of what is going on in our homes, our
schools and in our neighbourhood. There cannot be any dispassionate discussion
on the causes of such brutality without asking tough questions about ourselves
as to how our own hate mongering about different maslaks (sects) have acquired
a new normality within our everyday discourses.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Muslims are also reported in the mainstream media through their
‘peculiarities’, particularly in terms of their religion. Thus stories on
triple Talaq, polygamy and such issues gain wide prominence within the
mainstream media. A bit of research would tell us that polygamy is more among
Hindu castes than Muslims, but when there is a discourse of relating a
community to the practice of its religion, and then all facts and figures are
given a go by. The problem is compounded by the well-entrenched belief among
the media establishment that Muslims are best represented by the Ulema. And
thus we have in television studios Muslim religious clerics who through their
ignorance and trying to reduce everything to religion, end up giving a bad name
to Muslims.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

The sophistication that is required for arms training and the knowledge
that accompanies such training simply eludes a madrasa graduate. Within their
madrasas they are too engrossed in literal textual hair splitting and in
repeating a knowledge system which has absolutely no relationship with the
present world. When an average madrasa graduate in India cannot locate USA on
the world map, then it is too much to expect from him to be involved in the
obliteration of America. When average madrasa graduate is taught that it is the
Shia and the Ahmadias who are the enemies of Islam, then it is natural that
their energy will be channelized in countering them rather than thinking about
waging jihad against the Hindus....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

The ‘golden age’ of Islam tells us that there was always a tension
between the Ulema and the philosophers. The latter did not take them seriously
and at times publicly lambasted them for their limited understanding of how the
world works. To make matters worse, there were poets whose favourite pastime
was ridiculing the Ulema for the incoherence of their thoughts. Moreover,
philosophers were Aalims in their own right: no one could accuse IbnSina or
IbnRushd for not knowing religion. Indeed, in their own worlds there was hardly
a distinction between the pursuit of religious and material knowledge....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Analysts say that it is understandable that these things are happening in Pakistan. After all the country was made in the name of Islam; so it is a natural outcome that Islam will pay an important role in the public sphere. But then similar things are happening in Indonesia, a country whose tolerance and democracy was touted as the role model for Muslim countries the world over. The world’s most populous Muslim country with mid boggling diversity in terms of ethnicity, religions and languages is today falling prey to the same rhetoric making Islam the only standard against which all other religious and secular traditions must be judged and evaluated.....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

There was an attempt made by the earlier government to bring all such
madrasas under one umbrella by creating an All India Madrasa Board. It was a
good idea to start with, but with various interests competing as Muslim
interests, there was hardly any headway and eventually the suggestion went to
the cold storage. The interesting part of this proposal was the it were Muslims
themselves who had drafted this proposal. But then for many successive
governments, some Muslims are more important than others. The opposition to
this proposal from the Ulema saw to it that the bold proposal by reform minded
Muslims was shelved....

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

The regularity with which terrorists are able to attack key cities in Turkey is alarming. The previous year saw more than 25 terror attacks in different parts of the country including Ankara and Istanbul. Most of these attacks have been attributed to Islamist terrorism but then even the erstwhile secular formation like the Kurdistan Workers’ Party is not unknown to have used terror tactics. The latest attack yesterday on a nightclub in Istanbul is just one more in a series of such attacks. It is not clear whether there were multiple attackers involved but surely the analysis is veering around the consensus that it seems to be the handiwork of the ISIS. ...

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

Arshad Alam, New Age Islam

It is not that
atrocities against these Muslims have not been documented: Human rights groups
have done and have tried to make international bodies aware of it. Despite all
these documented proofs, important Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran
have not been able to isolate Myanmar over this issue. We need to ask those who
swear in the name of the Ummah: is the blood of Rohingyas insipid in comparison
to other Muslims?...